European Journal of American Culture - Current Issue

In our actions in relation to computer games, we are rarely forced to reflect on the question of how we conceptualize the medial objects upon and with which we are acting. Do we understand computer games as products, as economically outlined goods that can only be negotiated on the basis of an inherent hegemonic ideology in terms of their manufacture, distribution and, above all, their application? Or do we view them as open texts or spaces of experience which we can assimilate and within which we can take effect in a resistant, emancipatory or dissident way, either selectively or continuously? Do we shape the game, or does the game shape us? In a nutshell: is it possible to appropriate computer games? Davey Wreden’s games The Stanley Parable (2011) and The Beginner’s Guide (2015) can help us investigate these questions.

This article considers Trump’s presidency as metamodern, embodying contradictions within the established order and resonating with contemporary cultural trends. Oscillating between modernism and postmodernism, metamodernism is defined by coexistence of seemingly contrasting affective states and dispositions: enthusiasm and irony, hope and melancholy, attachment and alienation, generating a multifaceted subjecthood. Trump’s nostalgic slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) emphasizes this vacillation, a new inflection of an old phrase, received as both facetious and sincere, promising return to a prelapsarian state, while also taking neo-liberal ideals to extreme conclusions. This juxtaposition, the nostalgic impulse for something new, is traced as an increasingly dominant aesthetic form within digital games. As we explore, certain genres and aesthetics epitomize this, providing anachronistic audio-visuals, rhizomatic exploration, punishing gameplay, revolving around intertextuality and demands for community participation. We finally locate both Trump’s presidency and this nostalgic turn in contemporary digital games as symptomatic of a metamodern impulse, a search for stability and order amongst an increasingly fragmented, imbalanced and chaotic system.

This piece takes its cue from a pair of incidents – a not unfamiliar theme in game studies – relating to game scholarship and its engagement with right-wing politics. In the first case, well-known game scholar Bonnie ‘Bo’ Ruberg called on editors and reviewers to stop insisting that scholars include a reference to a certain online campaign of harassment, doxing and threats of physical violence. In the second case, I had a reviewer insist that I had to include a reference to the ‘Fortnite to alt-right pipeline’ because clearly games were causing alt-right lunacy. To be sure, these both constitute genre criticism – among others – at its most reductive and cynical, deciding what the institutional and audience expectations entail based on an assumption of the industrial ones. Then, biographical criticism and assertions about authorial intent or the necessary ‘touchstones’ began to appear. There seems to be a consistent and persistent insistence that somehow even the best and most accomplished scholars should forget decades of scholarship because ‘games are different’ and this tendency has been conditioned and shaped by reading games through the ‘lens’ of the Trump presidency. This is important because it confirms that essays about games still tend to fit into one of the two boxes Ruberg ticks: game scholars who are not necessarily adept at the specific content area or specialists in a given field who are not really game scholars. It is telling and symptomatic of the centripetal and centrifugal movements in game studies; that is, from within and without. Admittedly, games are different, but not so different that we should forget or ignore decades of scholarship or worse, do not bother to find out if it exists at all. Not only are many of these positions ahistorical – ignoring the fact that, as some much maligned games quite cleverly point out repeatedly within, the same things have been said about the corrupting power of soap operas, romance novels, comic books, wrestling, rap and hip hop, backwards masking in heavy metal and plain old rock ‘n’ roll – the positions are also tacitly or unwittingly ageist, classist and/or occasionally racist, homophobic and transphobic even as the author purports to be concerned with inequitable representations. Moreover, there are peculiarly US American concerns that are transposed onto ostensibly universal ones. These reveal that even the most ‘woke’ of the American left can be a cultural imperialist and that American exceptionalism is inescapable if not ineluctable.

American political rhetoric has become increasingly zealous in its use of right-wing, Christofascist and apocalyptic imagery. While its contemporary moment is deeply connected to the current Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, it has a much longer history in American popular culture. This article specifically links this contemporary movement to the Fallout franchise, a popular post-apocalyptic video game series to illuminate cultural patterns of America’s apocalyptic political rhetoric. The video game series begins as a trope-laden post-apocalyptic western of survival by the gun. Later and more recent iterations have emphasized settler-colonialist nation building, and other forms of troubling American exceptionalism in a post-nuclear world. The explicit connections between these militaristic and political conceits is so ubiquitous in American media that it has become a cultural point of identity.

The 45th presidential administration of the United States created numerous sweeping pieces of legislation that drastically curtailed how Americans thought of diversity and where marginalized folks of colour fit in the grand scheme of things. This administration pushed back against notions of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) as they pertained to marginalized groups, particularly in spaces of higher education. To combat this, there were numerous institutions across the country that began to develop or revamp their diversity programmes as a way to ‘show’ those who had been targeted – both faculty and students of colour – still had played a significant role in higher education. Unfortunately, these diversity programmes did little to nothing to help support faculty and students who relied on these programmes, but instead made them feel like this was meant to be ‘played’, like the latest video game. This article seeks to demonstrate how DEIA programmes function as a method of pay, while doing little to provide the necessary support for the folks that need it. Additionally, it shows how institutions of white supremacy are being perpetuated within these programmes, as they are merely used as a way to show others that the programmes exist, while both not actually serving the individuals these programmes were designed to benefit. It will also illustrate in a succinct fashion what DEIA programmes are meant to do and what they are not meant to do while using experiences of marginalized individuals to focus on the problems that exist within DEIA programmes. Finally, the article will provide a potential rubric, or call to action, that could help these programmes to function as an actual form of support as opposed to a system of ‘play’, because they do serve a vital purpose, but not in their current iterations.

Review of: California & Hawai’i Bound: U.S. Settler Colonialism & the Pacific West, 1848–1959, Henry Knight Lozano (2022)

Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 416.,

ISBN 978-1-49621-213-9, h/bk, $65.00